Connoisseurs of old-school Law & Order — Ben Stone, Paul Robinette, Logan and Cerreta — will recall that, once an episode, crusty old D.A. Adam Schiff would read off a litany of everything that was wrong with the state's case and growl, "Make the deal." Of course, this being television, they never did. Of course, this being television, they rarely lost at trial.

On Wednesday evening, in bringing second-degree murder charges against George Zimmerman for the crime of shooting Trayvon Martin, in a press conference that was strangely like a performance piece, special prosecutor Angela Corey put her flag in the ground in a very high place. To win her case on the top count of the indictment, she has to prove that Zimmerman shot Martin without premeditation, but with a depraved indifference to whether or not he would kill him, that he did so coolly, that his emotional state had no real bearing on why he fired the gun. But I suspect that Corey and her team have no intention of winning on that top count at all. I suspect that, if there's a deal to be cut on manslaughter — which, by Florida law, Corey had to include as a lesser option for the jury — Corey will take it. In fact, that's what I hope happens here. This, I suspect, cannot happen here.

While I am not a lawyer, and only rarely play one on this blog, this seems to be a walkover of a manslaughter case. Without knowing what forensic evidence, and other testimony, the prosecution has in its pocket, the facts seem to indicate that Zimmerman shot Martin for no other reason than the fact that Martin's presence in the neighborhood made Zimmerman nervous and/or curious, and that he fired his gun either because Martin ignored his wholly illegitimate order to stop, or because Martin confronted him as to why Zimmerman was following him. Neither of these would rise to a claim of self-defense. On the available facts, to accept either of these as a defense to a charge of manslaughter, would be an act of emotional jury-nullification, an admission that some jurors would have been as nervous and/or curious as Zimmerman was to see a young black kids walking with snack food through a neighborhood where Zimmerman thought he didn't belong.

(Also, while I do think this Mark O'Mara cat is a better lawyer than Zimmerman's had up to this point, and the local Florida punditariat seems to agree, he's got to do better than this while explaining his client's state of mind: "...Zimmerman is 'troubled by everything that has happened.' O'Mara added, 'Truly, it must be frightening to not be able to go into a 7/11 or into a store and literally to be in fact a prisoner wherever he was.'" A 7-11? Really? Good Christ. And how frightening it must have been for John Wilkes Booth not ever to be able to go into a theater again.)

In fact, if this were any other case, both Corey and O'Mara would cut a manslaughter deal in a heartbeat. A conviction for manslaughter-with-a-gun in Florida is no field of buttercups. You can do 30 years. You have to do at last 15, and the Florida penal system is not exactly noted for its advanced approach to rehabilitation rather than punishment. But this is not any other case, which is why I think we will have a trial, because this crime has now reached the level where the community — and a lot of the country — demands a ceremony of public expiation.

You could see the beginnings of the ritual in the first press conference on Wednesday, in which Corey attempted not only to explain the charges against Zimmerman, which she did thoroughly and with considerable grace, but also to get the entire apparatus of local law-enforcement, and the city of Sanford, off the hook. She criticized the press, and the outside groups — as if there would have been any prosecution at all without the outcry that began in the social media and soon echoed through the rest of it. There was a lot of self-congratulation for her own investigative team. (This continued through the night as local officials kept to their talking-points. You wanted a trial? You got a trial. Now everybody chill out.) The trial is going to be a way for local law-enforcement to atone for having botched this case in the first place.

In 1992, in one of the strangest assignments of my life, I went to Milwaukee to cover the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer for the murders of 15 men, most of whom he'd dismembered, some of whose body parts he'd kept for souvenirs — including, if I recall correctly, an altar of skulls in his apartment and a heart in his locker at work — and several of whom he'd eaten. Dahmer pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, so the trial became a lengthy exposition on the sanity of a cannibal murderer. The trial took place after it had become plain that the Milwaukee police had botched this case even worse than the Sanford cops blew the Trayvon Martin shooting. Dahmer's victims were, for the most part, gay men, and the police were not exactly enthusiastic about investigating the deaths of people they saw as being on the margin. Most notoriously, in May of 1991, two Milwaukee police officers found a 14-year old boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone dazed, naked, and bleeding from the rectum on the street near Dahmer's apartment. Dahmer convinced them that the boy was his 19-year old lover and, despite what they later called a strange smell in Dahmer's apartment, the cops bought Dahmer's story and left Sinthasomplone with him. Ultimately, Dahmer killed him and kept his skull as a souvenir.

Dahmer's defense had no chance of succeeding — even though he was plainly crazier than a shithouse rat. The entire city needed him in prison because allowing him to conduct his atrocities had been a failure of the entire city. (The other people in his apartment house often heard power saws whining in the night, and said and did nothing.) Some trials become ceremonies of atonement because the places in which they are held demand that they are. And rituals of atonement demand certainty and closure. They demand expiation and absolution. Corey's press conference was nothing if it was not the first act in the ceremony of community expiation that George Zimmerman's trial is going to be.

I am less sure how I feel about the ritual of justice than justice itself. This is certainly about justice for the Martins. This is certainly about justice for a community, both in Sanford and around the country, that looks upon the shooting of Trayvon Martin as the most obvious demonstration that the lives of young black men are of less account than the unreasoning fears of the white majority. That calculation is at the heart of the transparently idiotic "Stand Your Ground" laws that are now under scrutiny around the country. In her press conference, Corey indicated that, if she has to challenge the law to convict Zimmerman, then she will. We will have to see about that.

(As a measure of how completely twisted these laws are, consider that Jake England in Tulsa allegedly shot up some black people in Tulsa because his father had been assaulted by a burglar who'd gotten off lightly by relying on that state's "Stand Your Ground" law. It's simply a license to kill, which is entirely what it was designed to be.)

But there is something that rings for caution in me about his dynamic. Trials are not supposed to be public rituals of expiation. (Sentences are, but that's another discussion.) They are not vehicles for forgiveness, or mechanisms by which a town or a city "gets past" something. (Neither, it should be said, are they supposed to throw a body to an angry crowd just because it demands one.) To turn this trial into a public ceremony by which Sanford absolves itself for the nearly criminal stupidity with which is has handled this case from jump is to substitute boosterism for justice, George Babbitt for Blackstone. It also is to invite the people who were going to treat this whole thing as Angela Corey's bending to the will of an angry mob if she did anything except run George Zimmerman for mayor to sharpen their arguments. I hope this whole thing doesn't turn into that. I have no doubts that it will. Sanford needs to acquit itself too badly. I wish it were possible to cut that deal. I have no doubts that it is not.